>> The same is true for contracts. The wording and situations >> leave grey area.
Not correct.
>> For instance, is the school liable if a student downloads >> and installs software the school isn't licensed for? What >> if the student is? What if the student just downloaded it, >> but didn't install it? What about a teacher working in his >> spare time?
Yes, yes (if they don't have the documentation), no, yes. Every computer that physically belongs to the school is ultimately the responsibility of the school. That sounds harsh, but the way most colleges handle this is by requiring students to sign a transfer of responsibility to themselves before they are given access. Even in the absence of this, a school could most likely recover their damages from the student or teacher involved if they brought the matter to court.
>> Contracts are the art of negotiation. Microsoft's goal in >> contracts is to get as much as they can to go towards >> their side. This means that they leave grey area where >> they want grey area, and tighten up things where they want >> things tightened up.
I agree that grey area in contracts is effectively wiggle room. As the licensor, I contend that MS wants to eliminate these areas. What would be a situation in which you feel MS would deliberately want to leave things ambiguous?
>> I believe I did, but you still reject them. I'm beginning >> to doubt that further discussion will be fruitful for >> either of us.
I am addressing strictly whether grey areas exist in the MS contracts. While you may consider a student pirating software a grey area in terms of whether the school should be liable or not, I think it is exactly this sort of issue that is most beneficial to MS to explicitly detail. Why leave up to debate what they can settle with a simple sentence?
The X-Wing Strategy Guide was a thick book that provided a narrative example of a rebel pilot as he attempted each mission in the X-Wing game. It read like a reasonably interesting novel written from the perspective of the pilot, and contained his detailed mission analysis complete with detailed maps and screenshots. After each mission he'd reflect on what worked and what didn't, and what he would have done differently (alternate strategies). It was very well done - I'd love to see this concept applied to current generation games.
Despite the fact that this is probably smoke and mirrors, the overall attraction is pretty high. The difference between a 30-60 ping and a 60-90 ping is extremely significant at high end gameplay. Consider that hardcore FPS gamers spend $500 on a cutting edge video card to pick up another few frames per second and I think you can safely say that a solution that would reliably lower latency by 20-30ms would sell like hotcakes to the enthusiast crowd.
Mpath was doomed from the start because they segmented their users onto special servers. Gamers primarily want a better ping to gain an advantage, end of story. Lowering everybody's ping equally was a nice benefit, but it certainly didn't entice enough people to sign up for the monthly fees. When you add in the sharp skill break differentials in online gaming, it became very hard for mpath to attract anybody but the truly hardcore gamers - and they all preferred to play on ladder servers anyway.
One intriguing possibility would be if a company were to host a large number of dedicated servers for each popular online FPS, then have a solution that would allow people to pay for special access to those same servers with less latency. The thought of gaining a lower ping on a server they already play would be much more likely to sway gamers to sign up for an account then moving to dedicated servers with other low ping players.
When it comes to following a license, I have yet to see any examples of "grey areas". Item 1Aii will either have been followed correctly and documented correctly by the school or it will not have been followed correctly. Contracts of *any* nature are drawn up specifically to create black and white situations like this. If there is a grey area it means that whoever wrote up the contract did a shoddy job. With how much MS invests in its legal team I don't really see that happening.
I agree with your basic principle, but for the same reason that your earlier examples were irreleveant, it just doesn't apply here. If Auditors had to make a gut feel assessment on whether a school was in violation or not I would completely agree with you. As it is, however, auditors don't *decide* anything. They strictly tally data and accrue evidence for said data. My counter basic principle would be that if you have an interest in the outcome it makes sense that you would be enforcing the procedures.
That being said, I'm not a copyright lawyer. If you can provide a convincing example of what a grey area may be in regards to a MS EULA, I would definitely reconsider the argument.
The difference between our positions is that I do not believe it is a bad thing for licenses to be enforced down to "all the exact minutiae". That is the perfect right of the corporation be it Microsoft or Mozilla.
In your private life it is fine if you want to throw the wrapper in the garbage without reading the EULA. If you run an IT department at a school, you need to know exactly what you are agreeing to do and not do with every piece of software your school acquires. The fact that this does not happen is simply because software companies have been too concerned with getting early influence on students to properly enforce their licenses in the past.
As has been said elsewhere - if licenses are too much of a hassle for you to deal with - install Linux! If enough schools switch to Linux then you'll see Microsoft rewrite their licenses. Agreeing to a license and then not following it simply shouldn't be an option for any school district.
On a further note along this line... I purchased both Empire at War and Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. They are both quite good, but Gal Civ II is superior to the extent that it really made me think about licensing.
Originally I felt that Lucasarts did a really great job at controlling their license and making sure it turned out quality products. Tie Fighter remains my favorite PC game of all time and for a long stretch I always felt confident purchasing the latest Star Wars title. Rather than depending on the license, each game actually strengthened the license. Somewhere between then and now it seems like LA has fallen to depending on the license for a successful product - most of their current releases probably would not have even been made without the license.
I highly recommend trying Gal Civ II, the website is www.galciv2.com. You can download it straight from their website or try a demo.
The SWG track record has been something like SOE Malevolence 24, Users 0. Highlights include that whole incident where they deliberately lied to their playerbase while they were working on still another revamp and the consistent fabrications about profession enhancements which were "almost done" only to turn out to never have been started. Then there was that snafu involving the expansion which said revamp invalidated after less than a week of retail after SOE has taken our money for it. Then the fact that it took them tens of thousands of angry gamers threatening a class action lawsuit to get them to offer a refund. Then there were all those forum bannings for veterans civilly stating their dissastification with the changes.
The single consistent move SOE has made besides running their game steadily into the ground has been screwing their veteran players. I think at some point the complete disregard for user satisfaction has to knock SOE out of list of developers eligible for "Cautious Optimism". SWG could be returned to publish 9, every item could be reinstated, every forum user could be unbanned.. and it would still be run by SOE. There would still be horrible customer support with a complete disregard for the end user - and that alone will probably keep most of the veterans away regardless of any future SWG developments.
Everquest 2 hasn't done well. While they are removing the initial sticker price I wouldn't go so far as to call it free - if a gamer subscribes they expect them to play at least 6 months before quitting - $90 at $15 per. Complete reliance on monthly fees is hardly new in the MMO world, but for a major western developer such as SOE it definitely marks a step in the journey to microstransactions.
What bothers me about your example is not so much that somebody bypassed the many hours of tedious grinding that you put in to get your mount, but that you found it to be tedious grinding. That's the bigger issue facing MMO's moving forward - how to identify what players find "fun" and reward them for doing those activies. To take WOW as an example - players at any one point are usually choosing between having fun, grinding levels, or grinding money. Developers are going to have to figure out how to incorporate the three to win veteran MMO gamers in the future.
I've never really understood the surprised indignation society seems to carry over the fact that there is a thriving real world demand for game characters, items and money. It's definitely cheating and it's definitely in violation of the EULA. It's far less malevolent than software and music piracy, however, and that has become fairly socially acceptable. Both are cases where people take the easy way to get what they want, but it's amusing to see people with 200 GB of pirated mp3's write posts complaining about people who are actually paying for what they want.
Buying gold is a fairly cheap entertainment investment. A stereotypical MMO gamer may pay $15/month for a single account and play about 20 hours per week. That works out to about $0.50 for a three hour play session. Compare that to $10 for bowling, $10 for a movie, $15 for dinner, $30-50 for a play, $50 for a sports ticket and it's easy to see why many gamers feel that MMO's provide very cheap entertainment. Spending $50 on gold every now and then still leaves them on the low side of recreational spending.
Most importantly, the argument that bought achievements mean less than earned achievements remains too weak to alter public behavior. A store bought rug certainly carries less "meaning" than a rug you made yourself, yet most people are unwilling to devote the time and effort to weaving their own rugs. Rug weaving is arguably more interesting than gold farming (some people choose it as a hobby in itself), yet most people still prefer to avoid the issue by purchasing one themselves. In the end, if we ignore the "cheating" aspect of gold purchasing, it is no different than paying a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn for you.
Gold purchasing is here to stay... as long as there are MMO gamers willing to deal in US dollars to acquire things they want. Because developers are paying attention to this it's probably only a matter of time before we see more systems like Sony's marketplace crop up. After all, why should companies let the gold farmers capture profit that they could be earning themselves? Beyond that, I wouldn't be surprised if it was only a matter of time until western MMO's are completely converted to the Free-To-Play microtransation models popular in asian MMO's. It doesn't take much imagination to invision a Star Wars Galaxies 2 where your character account is linked to a checking account, and you have the option to buy things from NPC vendors for either ingame credits, or out of game dollars - say $50 for 5 premium pearls and a unique hologram.
Sadly, I agree that many schools are probably in violation whether they have pirated software or not. That should be the real news story, however - "Springfield Elementary IT department found violating licenses due to underfunding and incompetence/negligence".
The solution to this is giving more money to schools for technology so they can hire knowledgeable IT staff. There also needs to be transparency on licenses between admins and the school management. If something is semi-technical then it often is left entirely to the IT department and this is a good way for management to get surprised by license infringments at some point.
Criticizing corporations for working to make sure their agreements are followed is not the solution.
>> Exactly the same as a federal inspector shouldn't also >> have had a job at the packing plant he's inspecting, >> or a judge shouldn't know someone they're judging
It seems to me that neither of these are remotely the same. The federal inspector would be inclined to overlook the violations and you can't provide evidence for something you didn't see. Judicial rulings, on the other hand, are not even remotely relevant. Judges exist because we don't have solid proof of everything and need people who can make a judgement call.
Auditors of any sort do not have the luxury of making a "judgement call" that Springfield Elementary had 13 license infractions. They look for and reference detailed proof of violations, ie.. same keys used across more systems than the license allowed, lack of documentation on the part of the school, pirated keys, whatever.
Your allusion that MS needs auditors to either falsify data or issue baseless bogus violation charges against schools is blatant due to lack of alternatives.
Or maybe I'm just too unimaginative? Can you provide a specific example of how a Microsoft auditor would be a worse choice for an audit than a network admin as regards to accuracy?
I played PlanetSide in beta as well as for the first couple of months. It is fairly successful at copying the tiered strategy present in other unusual MMOs like Shattered Galaxy, but two serious faults caused me to cancel my subscription.
1) There's not enough emphasis on balance. While occasionally even numbers will meet at a specific spot, that is the exception rather than the rule. Why should I spend 75% of my in game time either getting steamrolled by superior numbers or having to hunt for enemies to fight? I can simply log onto a FPS and jump into a 16/16 or 32/32 match right away without all the wasted time.
2) More importantly, the cone aiming system is a disaster. By introducing the randomness in projectile movement they manage to do a decent job of masking the fact that everybody is playing with a fairly high ping typical of a mmo. However while the randomness may be realistic in warfare, it is so annoying and alien to the hardcore FPS crowd that they move on really quickly.
>> The main point was that tracking licenses (and >> preventing license violations, and paying for audits >> and avoiding vendor strong-arm tactics) is a non- >> trivial cost.
Yes, it would be much easier and cheaper if schools could simply ignore the licenses - that is exactly why any corporation would be wary about license violations in this case.
The district is ultimately responsible for anything that occurs on their computers, whether it is a network admin, a teacher, a student, or the computer mysteriously pirates software itself. They can in turn go after whomever they view the culprits to be. A student who installed pirated software on a computer that MS Auditors located and charged the school for would be liable for the damages in civil court.
The most confusing part of your post was the fox and the henhouses reference. Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft auditors would install pirated versions of their OS on school computers so they could later fine the school for the violations? I'm all for MS hate but if you go over the top with it you just look ridiculous.
In this case even if the destructible element was easily replaceable for each test it would still invalidate the point of the experiment. Ceramics are seen as a very light solution that are cheap to produce, and with a high resistance they could have many applications in protective sheathings such as light armor.
Avoiding the initial contact through a destructible cushion, a parachute, or any means really wouldn't help when you are talking about a product like a light chest armor for police capable of stopping rounds that pierce kevlar.
Furthermore, I doubt the widow of the police officer would appreciate you telling her that you designed the armor on the principle that the best way to solve the problem was for the officer to simply avoid the bullets in the first place.
A lot of people like to pick a particular console and then rail against the rest, but the truth is that gamers should be rooting for all three companies. I have a 360 that I am perfectly happy with and I probably won't buy a Revolution. However, I still hope that the Revolution is a smash hit and opens up an entire genre of next generation games. The benefits to me would be enormous as Sony and MS would have to make a lot of concessions to compete.
No matter what you think about the Xbox or the PS2, the PS3 delay is a disappointing move for consumers. Even die-hard Xbox fans should realize that this could very well mean a delay in the price drop of the Xbox 360 as well, and definitely a little less pushing to get the next wave of titles out before the PS2 launches.
It's funny how you write as if a company trying to capture additional surpluses is a bad thing. When your local pizza shop gives discounts to students is that a bad thing too? Price discrimination is one of the few tools that exist for companies trying to capture profits from disparate consumer groups.
Since when has it been wrong for companies to try to make money? When companies such as MS harm innovation through predatory practices you have a legitimate (and serious) complaint, but price discrimination is fundamental stuff taught in captalism 101. Is the fact that Microsoft is charging for software in the first place also wrong?
I attended the University of Washington and competition for the science and engineering fields was very strong. I think my senior year the EE department only ending up accepting around a third of the applicants, but a little of that is mitigated by students applying to multiple engineering departments.
Some of the difference is probably regional in that Seattle has a very strong emphasis on technical wizadry, and a little of it is probably cultural. West Coast universities have a pretty high ratio of foreign students from the Pacific Rim who are specifically looking to study engineering and sciences.
The big XBOX successes in the FPS market have come from casual and non-hardcore gamers who discovered how much fun the FPS genre is with Halo and Halo 2. It's ok if they are not 100% optimized because they are having a lot of fun anyways, and playing against people with the same handicaps.
It really isn't even debateable that the KB/Mouse combo is vastly superior to any controller. This isn't the fault of the controllers, merely a result of how truly excellent the WASD setup is for power gaming.
When Goldeneye was huge on the N64 one summer in college I used to play it heavily with a large group of friends. I had played several FPS games on the PC (quake2 especially), but never at a clan level. The control system in Goldeneye wasn't super easy, but we all had a blast and became pretty good. Then that year in college I really got into UT, joined a clan, and played very seriously. When I went back to hanging out over christmas break with the same friends we fired up the N64 and suddenly I couldn't stand goldeneye. I had been pretty good at it, but all I saw were the limitations imposed by the clunky controls and it was more frustrating than fun.
Most of the people who play FPS games on a console do it relaxing on a couch, eating junk food, hopefully hanging out with friends. The XBOX controller works far better for this than the PS2 controller or the gamecube controller (I won't go into how crazy Vice City drove me on the PS2). Microsoft could definitely add a keyboard and mouse setup for the xbox if they wanted, but it would be a waste of money and time. If you are going to be sitting at a desk in front of a TV, you might as well be sitting at your desk in front of your computer.
I believe he is expressing skepticism in the utility of the wand capabilities of the Revolution controller, which is cited in around half of the reasons people say they are going to get a Revolution. The other half tout the Nintendo franchises ie. Mario and Zelda.
It is certainly nice that the revolution will be able to play legacy NES games, but really that isn't the crucial feature that will win me over or lose me as a consumer. Like the original poster, I like that the 360 allows me to play HD games with friends.. right now.
The problem with your line of reasoning is that in this case, the point of the contest was to design a mug that would be resistant to sudden impact forces. The 15 foot drop to the ground is nothing but an easy way to test durability.
You could easily defeat the Edge-on Impact Test with a system that simply moved the test ceramic out of the way of the oncoming projectile. Would that be worth second place too? Probably not, because the solution does not satisfy the goal - that of constructing a durable ceramic.
Potting is very widespread in asian MMO's and has pretty drastic effects on PvP. It nearly always provides a strong boost to high damage characters who can kill in one or two hits and makes the high speed/low damage characters much less effective.
A good example of this is Conquer Online (www.conqueronline.com). CO is a free to play MMORPG similar to Ragnarok Online that has become extremely popular in China. Pots are fairly inexpensive to buy and your only limit is inventory space.
The Archer is a popular ranged class that gets a very fast attack (two arrows per second) that can hit any object on the screen without missing and can also fly for nearly a minute, avoiding all melee damage entirely.
The Trojan on the other hand is a melee class that requires actually connecting with an opponent to do damage, which is fairly difficult if the opponent is dodging around. However, their attack is strong enough to kill most characters in a single hit if they can land it.
As you can imagine, without pots the Archer will win everytime by simply flying and then shooting the trojan until he dies. With the addition of pots, however, trojans can simply renew their health whenever they want until the archer has to land again, at which point they can easily kill them in one hit. The pots do not benefit the archer in this case because they die in a single blow.
At the same time, the healer class (water taoist) is in very high demand for reviving, but never for healing. In CO you only gain experience for damage done to monsters as well, so it becomes difficult to level a healer.
I'll grant that most shooters carry little applicable value for the average 21st century human... so far.
When the alien invaders/mutated humans/zombies show up, however, you'll be glad for a few lessons.
1) Constant movement around the map is the primary key to avoiding a grisly death at the hands of a particularly ugly creature that otherwise would have snuck up behind you and torn out your spine.
2) Scrounging up *every possible* health pack isn't just life saving, it will also enable you to become rich selling them to those who didn't have your videogame inspired foresight.
3) All doors you need to open will be color coded and have a corresponding colored key hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the door.
4) When you come to a dark hallway always send somebody else ahead to scout it out first. After the alien tentacle has burst through the floor and dashed them to pieces against a wall, you can then usually simply sneak by quietly on the opposite side.
Conquer Onlinehttp://www.conqueronline.com/ does this via an in game Training Grounds area that your character will automatically gain skills and experience at. It doesn't work while you are offline, but it's a pretty small client and easy to keep minimized.
Lord of the Rings Onlinehttp://lotro.turbine.com/ is also tentatively planning on a passive leveling system. The idea is that some skills would level over time, while some would require direct intervention. Whether this will make release or not is difficult to say, as there has been a significant amount of redesigning so far.
It is important to take note that right now the 360 is an emergent technology with a high price breakpoint, dependence on expensive peripheral hardware for optimum performance, and a very limited selection of games. This places it squarely in the enthusiast market, and units are selling accordingly.
Sometime between now and the release of the PS3 each of those factors is going to be greatly reduced. HDTV will become far more common, prices will be lowered significantly, and the available game library will be not only larger, but far more diverse. Whether the XBOX 360 will be able to have widespread success in the broad market when this occurs is unknown, but it's definitely too early to decry the launch as a failure.
Slashdot Mirror
>> The same is true for contracts. The wording and situations
>> leave grey area.
Not correct.
>> For instance, is the school liable if a student downloads
>> and installs software the school isn't licensed for? What
>> if the student is? What if the student just downloaded it,
>> but didn't install it? What about a teacher working in his
>> spare time?
Yes, yes (if they don't have the documentation), no, yes. Every computer that physically belongs to the school is ultimately the responsibility of the school. That sounds harsh, but the way most colleges handle this is by requiring students to sign a transfer of responsibility to themselves before they are given access. Even in the absence of this, a school could most likely recover their damages from the student or teacher involved if they brought the matter to court.
>> Contracts are the art of negotiation. Microsoft's goal in
>> contracts is to get as much as they can to go towards
>> their side. This means that they leave grey area where
>> they want grey area, and tighten up things where they want
>> things tightened up.
I agree that grey area in contracts is effectively wiggle room. As the licensor, I contend that MS wants to eliminate these areas. What would be a situation in which you feel MS would deliberately want to leave things ambiguous?
>> I believe I did, but you still reject them. I'm beginning
>> to doubt that further discussion will be fruitful for
>> either of us.
I am addressing strictly whether grey areas exist in the MS contracts. While you may consider a student pirating software a grey area in terms of whether the school should be liable or not, I think it is exactly this sort of issue that is most beneficial to MS to explicitly detail. Why leave up to debate what they can settle with a simple sentence?
The X-Wing Strategy Guide was a thick book that provided a narrative example of a rebel pilot as he attempted each mission in the X-Wing game. It read like a reasonably interesting novel written from the perspective of the pilot, and contained his detailed mission analysis complete with detailed maps and screenshots. After each mission he'd reflect on what worked and what didn't, and what he would have done differently (alternate strategies). It was very well done - I'd love to see this concept applied to current generation games.
Despite the fact that this is probably smoke and mirrors, the overall attraction is pretty high. The difference between a 30-60 ping and a 60-90 ping is extremely significant at high end gameplay. Consider that hardcore FPS gamers spend $500 on a cutting edge video card to pick up another few frames per second and I think you can safely say that a solution that would reliably lower latency by 20-30ms would sell like hotcakes to the enthusiast crowd.
Mpath was doomed from the start because they segmented their users onto special servers. Gamers primarily want a better ping to gain an advantage, end of story. Lowering everybody's ping equally was a nice benefit, but it certainly didn't entice enough people to sign up for the monthly fees. When you add in the sharp skill break differentials in online gaming, it became very hard for mpath to attract anybody but the truly hardcore gamers - and they all preferred to play on ladder servers anyway.
One intriguing possibility would be if a company were to host a large number of dedicated servers for each popular online FPS, then have a solution that would allow people to pay for special access to those same servers with less latency. The thought of gaining a lower ping on a server they already play would be much more likely to sway gamers to sign up for an account then moving to dedicated servers with other low ping players.
When it comes to following a license, I have yet to see any examples of "grey areas". Item 1Aii will either have been followed correctly and documented correctly by the school or it will not have been followed correctly. Contracts of *any* nature are drawn up specifically to create black and white situations like this. If there is a grey area it means that whoever wrote up the contract did a shoddy job. With how much MS invests in its legal team I don't really see that happening.
I agree with your basic principle, but for the same reason that your earlier examples were irreleveant, it just doesn't apply here. If Auditors had to make a gut feel assessment on whether a school was in violation or not I would completely agree with you. As it is, however, auditors don't *decide* anything. They strictly tally data and accrue evidence for said data. My counter basic principle would be that if you have an interest in the outcome it makes sense that you would be enforcing the procedures.
That being said, I'm not a copyright lawyer. If you can provide a convincing example of what a grey area may be in regards to a MS EULA, I would definitely reconsider the argument.
The difference between our positions is that I do not believe it is a bad thing for licenses to be enforced down to "all the exact minutiae". That is the perfect right of the corporation be it Microsoft or Mozilla.
In your private life it is fine if you want to throw the wrapper in the garbage without reading the EULA. If you run an IT department at a school, you need to know exactly what you are agreeing to do and not do with every piece of software your school acquires. The fact that this does not happen is simply because software companies have been too concerned with getting early influence on students to properly enforce their licenses in the past.
As has been said elsewhere - if licenses are too much of a hassle for you to deal with - install Linux! If enough schools switch to Linux then you'll see Microsoft rewrite their licenses. Agreeing to a license and then not following it simply shouldn't be an option for any school district.
On a further note along this line... I purchased both Empire at War and Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. They are both quite good, but Gal Civ II is superior to the extent that it really made me think about licensing.
Originally I felt that Lucasarts did a really great job at controlling their license and making sure it turned out quality products. Tie Fighter remains my favorite PC game of all time and for a long stretch I always felt confident purchasing the latest Star Wars title. Rather than depending on the license, each game actually strengthened the license. Somewhere between then and now it seems like LA has fallen to depending on the license for a successful product - most of their current releases probably would not have even been made without the license.
I highly recommend trying Gal Civ II, the website is www.galciv2.com. You can download it straight from their website or try a demo.
The SWG track record has been something like SOE Malevolence 24, Users 0. Highlights include that whole incident where they deliberately lied to their playerbase while they were working on still another revamp and the consistent fabrications about profession enhancements which were "almost done" only to turn out to never have been started. Then there was that snafu involving the expansion which said revamp invalidated after less than a week of retail after SOE has taken our money for it. Then the fact that it took them tens of thousands of angry gamers threatening a class action lawsuit to get them to offer a refund. Then there were all those forum bannings for veterans civilly stating their dissastification with the changes.
The single consistent move SOE has made besides running their game steadily into the ground has been screwing their veteran players. I think at some point the complete disregard for user satisfaction has to knock SOE out of list of developers eligible for "Cautious Optimism". SWG could be returned to publish 9, every item could be reinstated, every forum user could be unbanned.. and it would still be run by SOE. There would still be horrible customer support with a complete disregard for the end user - and that alone will probably keep most of the veterans away regardless of any future SWG developments.
Everquest 2 hasn't done well. While they are removing the initial sticker price I wouldn't go so far as to call it free - if a gamer subscribes they expect them to play at least 6 months before quitting - $90 at $15 per. Complete reliance on monthly fees is hardly new in the MMO world, but for a major western developer such as SOE it definitely marks a step in the journey to microstransactions.
What bothers me about your example is not so much that somebody bypassed the many hours of tedious grinding that you put in to get your mount, but that you found it to be tedious grinding. That's the bigger issue facing MMO's moving forward - how to identify what players find "fun" and reward them for doing those activies. To take WOW as an example - players at any one point are usually choosing between having fun, grinding levels, or grinding money. Developers are going to have to figure out how to incorporate the three to win veteran MMO gamers in the future.
I've never really understood the surprised indignation society seems to carry over the fact that there is a thriving real world demand for game characters, items and money. It's definitely cheating and it's definitely in violation of the EULA. It's far less malevolent than software and music piracy, however, and that has become fairly socially acceptable. Both are cases where people take the easy way to get what they want, but it's amusing to see people with 200 GB of pirated mp3's write posts complaining about people who are actually paying for what they want.
Buying gold is a fairly cheap entertainment investment. A stereotypical MMO gamer may pay $15/month for a single account and play about 20 hours per week. That works out to about $0.50 for a three hour play session. Compare that to $10 for bowling, $10 for a movie, $15 for dinner, $30-50 for a play, $50 for a sports ticket and it's easy to see why many gamers feel that MMO's provide very cheap entertainment. Spending $50 on gold every now and then still leaves them on the low side of recreational spending.
Most importantly, the argument that bought achievements mean less than earned achievements remains too weak to alter public behavior. A store bought rug certainly carries less "meaning" than a rug you made yourself, yet most people are unwilling to devote the time and effort to weaving their own rugs. Rug weaving is arguably more interesting than gold farming (some people choose it as a hobby in itself), yet most people still prefer to avoid the issue by purchasing one themselves. In the end, if we ignore the "cheating" aspect of gold purchasing, it is no different than paying a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn for you.
Gold purchasing is here to stay... as long as there are MMO gamers willing to deal in US dollars to acquire things they want. Because developers are paying attention to this it's probably only a matter of time before we see more systems like Sony's marketplace crop up. After all, why should companies let the gold farmers capture profit that they could be earning themselves? Beyond that, I wouldn't be surprised if it was only a matter of time until western MMO's are completely converted to the Free-To-Play microtransation models popular in asian MMO's. It doesn't take much imagination to invision a Star Wars Galaxies 2 where your character account is linked to a checking account, and you have the option to buy things from NPC vendors for either ingame credits, or out of game dollars - say $50 for 5 premium pearls and a unique hologram.
ESA has a good article about the feasibility of deflection located here: http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/doc/ACT-RPR-4100-DI-COL ORADO2005-OnTheDeflectionOfPotentiallyHazardousObj ects.pdf
I like the notion of impact deflection personally. Flying a rocket full of cement into an asteroid would make great news footage.
Sadly, I agree that many schools are probably in violation whether they have pirated software or not. That should be the real news story, however - "Springfield Elementary IT department found violating licenses due to underfunding and incompetence/negligence".
The solution to this is giving more money to schools for technology so they can hire knowledgeable IT staff. There also needs to be transparency on licenses between admins and the school management. If something is semi-technical then it often is left entirely to the IT department and this is a good way for management to get surprised by license infringments at some point.
Criticizing corporations for working to make sure their agreements are followed is not the solution.
>> Exactly the same as a federal inspector shouldn't also
>> have had a job at the packing plant he's inspecting,
>> or a judge shouldn't know someone they're judging
It seems to me that neither of these are remotely the same. The federal inspector would be inclined to overlook the violations and you can't provide evidence for something you didn't see. Judicial rulings, on the other hand, are not even remotely relevant. Judges exist because we don't have solid proof of everything and need people who can make a judgement call.
Auditors of any sort do not have the luxury of making a "judgement call" that Springfield Elementary had 13 license infractions. They look for and reference detailed proof of violations, ie.. same keys used across more systems than the license allowed, lack of documentation on the part of the school, pirated keys, whatever.
Your allusion that MS needs auditors to either falsify data or issue baseless bogus violation charges against schools is blatant due to lack of alternatives.
Or maybe I'm just too unimaginative? Can you provide a specific example of how a Microsoft auditor would be a worse choice for an audit than a network admin as regards to accuracy?
I played PlanetSide in beta as well as for the first couple of months. It is fairly successful at copying the tiered strategy present in other unusual MMOs like Shattered Galaxy, but two serious faults caused me to cancel my subscription.
1) There's not enough emphasis on balance. While occasionally even numbers will meet at a specific spot, that is the exception rather than the rule. Why should I spend 75% of my in game time either getting steamrolled by superior numbers or having to hunt for enemies to fight? I can simply log onto a FPS and jump into a 16/16 or 32/32 match right away without all the wasted time.
2) More importantly, the cone aiming system is a disaster. By introducing the randomness in projectile movement they manage to do a decent job of masking the fact that everybody is playing with a fairly high ping typical of a mmo. However while the randomness may be realistic in warfare, it is so annoying and alien to the hardcore FPS crowd that they move on really quickly.
>> The main point was that tracking licenses (and
>> preventing license violations, and paying for audits
>> and avoiding vendor strong-arm tactics) is a non-
>> trivial cost.
Yes, it would be much easier and cheaper if schools could simply ignore the licenses - that is exactly why any corporation would be wary about license violations in this case.
The district is ultimately responsible for anything that occurs on their computers, whether it is a network admin, a teacher, a student, or the computer mysteriously pirates software itself. They can in turn go after whomever they view the culprits to be. A student who installed pirated software on a computer that MS Auditors located and charged the school for would be liable for the damages in civil court.
The most confusing part of your post was the fox and the henhouses reference. Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft auditors would install pirated versions of their OS on school computers so they could later fine the school for the violations? I'm all for MS hate but if you go over the top with it you just look ridiculous.
In this case even if the destructible element was easily replaceable for each test it would still invalidate the point of the experiment. Ceramics are seen as a very light solution that are cheap to produce, and with a high resistance they could have many applications in protective sheathings such as light armor.
Avoiding the initial contact through a destructible cushion, a parachute, or any means really wouldn't help when you are talking about a product like a light chest armor for police capable of stopping rounds that pierce kevlar.
Furthermore, I doubt the widow of the police officer would appreciate you telling her that you designed the armor on the principle that the best way to solve the problem was for the officer to simply avoid the bullets in the first place.
The winner is the consumer.
A lot of people like to pick a particular console and then rail against the rest, but the truth is that gamers should be rooting for all three companies. I have a 360 that I am perfectly happy with and I probably won't buy a Revolution. However, I still hope that the Revolution is a smash hit and opens up an entire genre of next generation games. The benefits to me would be enormous as Sony and MS would have to make a lot of concessions to compete.
No matter what you think about the Xbox or the PS2, the PS3 delay is a disappointing move for consumers. Even die-hard Xbox fans should realize that this could very well mean a delay in the price drop of the Xbox 360 as well, and definitely a little less pushing to get the next wave of titles out before the PS2 launches.
It's funny how you write as if a company trying to capture additional surpluses is a bad thing. When your local pizza shop gives discounts to students is that a bad thing too? Price discrimination is one of the few tools that exist for companies trying to capture profits from disparate consumer groups.
Since when has it been wrong for companies to try to make money? When companies such as MS harm innovation through predatory practices you have a legitimate (and serious) complaint, but price discrimination is fundamental stuff taught in captalism 101. Is the fact that Microsoft is charging for software in the first place also wrong?
I attended the University of Washington and competition for the science and engineering fields was very strong. I think my senior year the EE department only ending up accepting around a third of the applicants, but a little of that is mitigated by students applying to multiple engineering departments.
Some of the difference is probably regional in that Seattle has a very strong emphasis on technical wizadry, and a little of it is probably cultural. West Coast universities have a pretty high ratio of foreign students from the Pacific Rim who are specifically looking to study engineering and sciences.
FWIW
The big XBOX successes in the FPS market have come from casual and non-hardcore gamers who discovered how much fun the FPS genre is with Halo and Halo 2. It's ok if they are not 100% optimized because they are having a lot of fun anyways, and playing against people with the same handicaps.
It really isn't even debateable that the KB/Mouse combo is vastly superior to any controller. This isn't the fault of the controllers, merely a result of how truly excellent the WASD setup is for power gaming.
When Goldeneye was huge on the N64 one summer in college I used to play it heavily with a large group of friends. I had played several FPS games on the PC (quake2 especially), but never at a clan level. The control system in Goldeneye wasn't super easy, but we all had a blast and became pretty good. Then that year in college I really got into UT, joined a clan, and played very seriously. When I went back to hanging out over christmas break with the same friends we fired up the N64 and suddenly I couldn't stand goldeneye. I had been pretty good at it, but all I saw were the limitations imposed by the clunky controls and it was more frustrating than fun.
Most of the people who play FPS games on a console do it relaxing on a couch, eating junk food, hopefully hanging out with friends. The XBOX controller works far better for this than the PS2 controller or the gamecube controller (I won't go into how crazy Vice City drove me on the PS2). Microsoft could definitely add a keyboard and mouse setup for the xbox if they wanted, but it would be a waste of money and time. If you are going to be sitting at a desk in front of a TV, you might as well be sitting at your desk in front of your computer.
I believe he is expressing skepticism in the utility of the wand capabilities of the Revolution controller, which is cited in around half of the reasons people say they are going to get a Revolution. The other half tout the Nintendo franchises ie. Mario and Zelda.
It is certainly nice that the revolution will be able to play legacy NES games, but really that isn't the crucial feature that will win me over or lose me as a consumer. Like the original poster, I like that the 360 allows me to play HD games with friends.. right now.
The problem with your line of reasoning is that in this case, the point of the contest was to design a mug that would be resistant to sudden impact forces. The 15 foot drop to the ground is nothing but an easy way to test durability.
E xperimentalBallistics/DeptPages/Projects/Edge-on_I mpact_01.asp
A much more involved (and expensive) way to test ceramics is with an Edge-on Impact Test. http://www.emi.fraunhofer.de/english/Departments/
You could easily defeat the Edge-on Impact Test with a system that simply moved the test ceramic out of the way of the oncoming projectile. Would that be worth second place too? Probably not, because the solution does not satisfy the goal - that of constructing a durable ceramic.
Potting is very widespread in asian MMO's and has pretty drastic effects on PvP. It nearly always provides a strong boost to high damage characters who can kill in one or two hits and makes the high speed/low damage characters much less effective. A good example of this is Conquer Online (www.conqueronline.com). CO is a free to play MMORPG similar to Ragnarok Online that has become extremely popular in China. Pots are fairly inexpensive to buy and your only limit is inventory space. The Archer is a popular ranged class that gets a very fast attack (two arrows per second) that can hit any object on the screen without missing and can also fly for nearly a minute, avoiding all melee damage entirely. The Trojan on the other hand is a melee class that requires actually connecting with an opponent to do damage, which is fairly difficult if the opponent is dodging around. However, their attack is strong enough to kill most characters in a single hit if they can land it. As you can imagine, without pots the Archer will win everytime by simply flying and then shooting the trojan until he dies. With the addition of pots, however, trojans can simply renew their health whenever they want until the archer has to land again, at which point they can easily kill them in one hit. The pots do not benefit the archer in this case because they die in a single blow. At the same time, the healer class (water taoist) is in very high demand for reviving, but never for healing. In CO you only gain experience for damage done to monsters as well, so it becomes difficult to level a healer.
I'll grant that most shooters carry little applicable value for the average 21st century human... so far.
When the alien invaders/mutated humans/zombies show up, however, you'll be glad for a few lessons.
1) Constant movement around the map is the primary key to avoiding a grisly death at the hands of a particularly ugly creature that otherwise would have snuck up behind you and torn out your spine.
2) Scrounging up *every possible* health pack isn't just life saving, it will also enable you to become rich selling them to those who didn't have your videogame inspired foresight.
3) All doors you need to open will be color coded and have a corresponding colored key hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the door.
4) When you come to a dark hallway always send somebody else ahead to scout it out first. After the alien tentacle has burst through the floor and dashed them to pieces against a wall, you can then usually simply sneak by quietly on the opposite side.
Conquer Onlinehttp://www.conqueronline.com/ does this via an in game Training Grounds area that your character will automatically gain skills and experience at. It doesn't work while you are offline, but it's a pretty small client and easy to keep minimized. Lord of the Rings Onlinehttp://lotro.turbine.com/ is also tentatively planning on a passive leveling system. The idea is that some skills would level over time, while some would require direct intervention. Whether this will make release or not is difficult to say, as there has been a significant amount of redesigning so far.
It's not quite that cut and dried.
It is important to take note that right now the 360 is an emergent technology with a high price breakpoint, dependence on expensive peripheral hardware for optimum performance, and a very limited selection of games. This places it squarely in the enthusiast market, and units are selling accordingly.
Sometime between now and the release of the PS3 each of those factors is going to be greatly reduced. HDTV will become far more common, prices will be lowered significantly, and the available game library will be not only larger, but far more diverse. Whether the XBOX 360 will be able to have widespread success in the broad market when this occurs is unknown, but it's definitely too early to decry the launch as a failure.